By giving its customers the choice of either buying its top-end VAX 9000 or buying an equivalent four- to six-processor VAX 6000 at about half the price, Digital Equipment Corp may have been too generous for its own good – in the present climate, users are picking the latter option in droves, only going for the VAX 9000 where they have to have its 40 MIPS or so uniprocessor performance. According to Electronic News, sales of the VAX 9000 fell by 30% to just 70 machines, bringing the installed base for the first nine months of volume shipments to just 250, so that there is no chance of the company meeting its first-year target of $1,000m in sales, which would require some 1,000 installations: all the signs are that the current quarter will be little better than the one just gone. The paper even questions whether DEC will manage to get an adequate return on the $1,000m it invested in developing the machine, though the company insists it is in no danger of failing to achieve $1,000m in sales overall. Microtel Communication Ltd, the British Aerospace Plc-led Personal Communications Network consortium, has awarded DEC UK a systems intergration and equipment contract with an estimated value of ?25m over five years. DEC will provide Microtel with its DECsite planning, construction and installation service for its data centre in Bristol, and network management systems consisting of Enterprise Management Achitecture and DECmcc products – and the company will also supply a VAX cluster minicomputer system.
